Honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Your Classroom
from NCTE INBOX 1-8-08

The ReadWriteThink lesson plan Martin Luther King, Jr., and Me: Identifying with a Hero (E) provides lots of ideas by encouraging students to explore the connections between King and themselves in journals and inquiry-based research. For a follow-up, try Living the Dream: 100 Acts of Kindness (E) or How Big Are Martin's Big Words? Thinking Big about the Future (E), both lessons from ReadWriteThink.

Nikki Giovanni's poem "The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr." is paired with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, taking students on a quest through time to the civil rights movement in the ReadWriteThink lesson Entering History: Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King, Jr. (M). For other multicultural teaching ideas, check out Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom, the NCTE book that inspired the lesson plan.

In the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Every Punctuation Mark Matters: A Mini-Lesson on Semicolons (M-S), students first explore King's use of semicolons and their rhetorical significance in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and then apply the lesson to their own writing.

Encourage your students to explore the ways that passionate words communicate the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination, and the American Dream in King's "I Have a Dream" speech with the ReadWriteThink lesson Exploring the Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, Words through Diamante Poetry (S).

For more details on the ways that King's word choice shapes his message, consider the Teaching English in the Two-Year College article "Using 'I Have a Dream' to Teach Strong Repetition (What Works for Me)" (S-C).

In "Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, 'I Have a Dream' in Context: Ceremonial Protest and African American Jeremiad" (C) from College English, King's "I Have a Dream" is presented as the product of African American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born.

See the ReadWriteThink calendar entry for King's birthday for additional online resources.